The new American poor law

Early in 2011, the US Census Bureau reported that 14.3 per cent or 47 million people – 1 in 6 of Americans – were living below the official poverty threshold, currently set at $22,400 annually for a family of four. However high levels of poverty in the United States preceded the economic meltdown of 2007-09. Between 2001 and 2007, poverty actually increased for the first time on record during an economic recovery, from 11.7 per cent in 2001 to 12.5 per cent in 2007. Poverty rates for single mothers in 2007 were 50 per cent, higher in the US than in 15 other high-income countries. Black employment rates and income were declining before the recession struck in 2007. And there is simply no evidence to support the familiar bromide that poverty in the US today is a temporary condition associated with youth or hard luck or economic crises. Preconceptions notwithstanding, the US is a low mobility society. That said, these trends worsened sharply with the onset of the Great Recession that began in 2007. The Economic Policy Institute reported that the typical working-age household, which had already seen a sharp decline of roughly $2300 in income from 2000 to 2006, saw another decline of $2700 from 2007 to 2009. A decade ago it was widely thought that the next phase of welfare innovation would be something called ‘workfare’. Although workfare programs on the ground varied considerably, the basic idea was simply to make the receipt of welfare benefits conditional on work by the recipient, sometimes work for wages, sometimes in exchange for a welfare check; sometimes the work was in the public sector, and sometimes for private employers. Jamie Peck studied these innovations as they were being developed in the US, Canada and Great Britain, and proposed that, local variations notwithstanding, the ‘policy orthodoxy of flexibly deregulated labour markets now [had] a social policy analogue in the concerted advocacy of workfare programs’. But Peck was also keenly aware of the limits of workfare, which depended on buoyant labour markets. And in fact, the welfare-to-work policies did not become dominant, just as in an earlier era the workhouse did not become dominant. Particularly in the United States, an older strategy of impoverishment and insult has prevailed, except that it has been imposed with particular vigour on women and minorities.

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